ITIL 4 Practices: One Step Deeper

Axelos has now via its ITIL 4 Global Development Programme released draft documents describing some of its ITIL 4 Practices. There will be 34 of these documents, one for each practice, which will contribute to the exam syllabuses for the ITIL Specialist, Strategist and Leader certifications.

Content

The Practice Guides show what a practice actually consists of, which was not made very clear in the ITIL 4 Foundation book. Their structure is as follows:

1.      General information: key terms and concepts, purpose, description, success factors and key performance indicators (KPIs);

2.      Value streams and processes: processes and activities, how the practice contributes to the service value chain;

3.      Organization and people: competencies needed, team and organizational solutions;

4.      Information and technology: information needed for the practice, tools and automation possibilities;

5.      Partners and suppliers: sourcing considerations, relationships with third parties.

Taking the Change Control Practice Guide as an example, it is clear that ITIL 4 is strongly steering away from being perceived as prescriptive: in pretty much every section it is stated explicitly that all that is described in this guide is guidance, and that guidance needs to be adapted to the specific circumstances of the organization using ITIL 4. As a result, there is a lot of use of the words “can” and “may”.

Practice Success Factors (PSFs) are what used to be known as Critical Success Factors (CSFs) in ITIL 2011. However, PSFs are more general, more customer-collaboration, and more value-oriented than the CSFs were. For example, a PSF for Change Control is “Minimize negative impact of changes”, whereas a CSF for Change Management in ITIL 2011 was “Ensuring that all changes to configuration items are well managed and recorded in the configuration management system”.

KPIs are still KPIs s usual: measurable metrics that are mapped to a PSF and indicate the effectiveness of the practices. So here we find things such as “Change success/acceptance rate over period” and “Stakeholder satisfaction with realization of individual changes”.

The four dimensions of service management (items 2-5 in the list above) are used not only to show how changes can be applied to these dimensions, but also how these four perspectives contribute to planning change.

The Value Stream contribution deals mostly with the process: inputs, activities and outputs, a few high-level flow-charts.

Organizations and People deal with roles, competences and responsibilities within the practice. For Change Control we have two roles only: “Change manager and change coordinator” and “Change authority”. In ITIL 2011 there were a few more, including change process owner, process manager, change initiator, change practitioner, change authority and CAB members and chair. IN ITIL 4, a CAB is hardly mentioned, just in passing as a possibility for a change authority team.

In Information and technology, we find some general pointers around what information needs to be exchanged in the practice and what elements of the practice can benefit from automation and tooling.

Finally, in Partners and Suppliers, a brief section is devoted to the use of third parties in Change control.

Conclusion

There are definitely some well-known elements in the Practice Guides, reshuffled where needed across the four dimensions. What has been described, however, is much more generic and much less detailed and prescriptive than what was in ITIL 2011. Hooks into Agile and DevOps are made to bring things up to date with current developments. Apart from the overall structure, I did not find a lot of really new content in the guides, though.